The San Francisco Bay Area Council (SFBAC) serves San Francisco and Alameda Counties and supports more than 300 local packs, troops, teams and crews. It includes five districts: the Golden Gate District which serves San Francisco and Daly City; the Peralta District, which serves Oakland and Emeryville; the Tres Ranchos District, which serves San Leandro, Hayward, Castro Valley, and San Lorenzo; the Mission Peak District, which serves Union City, Fremont, and Newark; and the Twin Valley District, which serves Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, and Sunol.

The Council office is located in San Leandro, California in a building known as the Youth Leadership Training Center (YLTC). This facility features Council offices and meeting rooms as well as the Scout Shop and a 40 foot climbing wall.

The Council maintains three camps: Rancho Los Mochos, located in the hills above Livermore, CA; Wente Scout Reservation, located east of Willits, CA; and Camp Royaneh, situated near the Russian River in Cazadero, CA.

History of the SFBAC Council

The year was 1914. In San Francisco's Chinatown, a group of eight young boys had found a worn copy of the Boy Scout Handbook. As they thumbed though the pages in the play yard of the Chinese Methodist Church, the boys were thoroughly intrigued and inspired by what they saw in this new youth movement, something that was non-existent in Chinatown at the time. Eagerly, they studied the sketches, the diagrams, and read the printed words. From that moment, they knew they wanted to be Boy Scouts.

These eight boys, the charter members of Troop 3, were Lim Wong, Edwar Lee, Tim Wong, Bing Moy, Stephen Moy, Nelson Wong, King Lee, and Chingwah Lee. It was Chingwah Lee's interest in Scouting had prompted him to obtain the handbook and it was he who sparked the interest of Scouting in the other boys.

They invited Lim J. Kwong, an engineering student attending the Mt. Tamalpais Military Academy, to be Scoutmaster. B.Y. Chu, a progressive Secretary of the Chinese YMCA, was nominated as the Troop Advisor. May 1914 marks the birth of Troop 3.

The boys recognized the lack of professional guidance. They wrote to National Boy Scout Headquarters in New York, stating their predicament. Field Scout Representative Harry Cross of the Los Angeles Council (the closest Council at the time) was notified. He came to San Francisco and assembled a group of prominent civic leaders to plan a local Council. It was in 1916, two years after the formation of Troop 3, that the San Francisco Boy Scout Council was formally organized.